Risk of nuclear war is still present

Colin Bullen’s letter ‘Nuclear Weapons Make Us Safe’ misses some important features of our nuclear age.

The pursuit of deterrence threatening the use of nukes to keep the use of nukes at bay - has side effects that must become fatal if we persist.

Remember arms racing? Zero to 60,000 nuclear weapons between 1949 and 1989. Untold trillions of dollars, roubles, pounds and franks spent buying devices whose sole purpose was not to be used. What would have survived the global nuclear winter if something had gone wrong? Is it rational to court this destiny for Earth’s inhabitants?

Perestroika, the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of communism and peaceful break-up of the Soviet Union saved our bacon. But the folly of nuclear weapons did not end.

Thousands of US and Russian nuclear weapons have been held on 24/7 hair-trigger alert for retaliatory launching since the 1970s. Though the Cold

War is long over we have never more than 15 minutes from a major nuclear exchange being launched.

There have been at least 12 incidents during that time when nuclear armed nations came close to unleashing nuclear catastrophe by mistake, machine error, misunderstanding, miscalculation or madmen. It was luck that saved us from the nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, said Robert McNamara. In 1983, Russian missile commander Stanislav Petrov refused to authorise a counterattack when Soviet flagged five incoming missiles from the United States. The world is still intact because he disobeyed orders.

Do nuclear weapons keep us safe or has their pursuit kept us poised to blast beautiful life-nurturing Earth into a radioactive hell? How much longer can we avoid the fatal combination of errors that will bring them smashing into everyday life, unless we enact ‘the elimination of nuclear weapons from national armouries’. That was unanimously voted for by the first UN General Assembly in January 1946.

Despairing of the nine nuclear armed nations honouring their repeated promises to disarm,

122 nations voted for the UN to negotiate a legally binding Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017. It entered into force in January 2021.

Now we need a global education programme to remind the citizens and governments of all nuclear owning nations to press their leaders to sign and implement this treaty without delay. If the UN needs help verify that nobody is cheating would you volunteer for training? I will.

Stuart Stephenson